A Village Losing Its Farmers: A Narrative Of Xia Village (1976-2006)

Following the path of Fei Hsiaotung's theory of ChaXuGeJu(pattern of difference sequence), the research has conducted a deep going reflection on the theory development of Chinese anthropology and the research progress in relative courses in the past thirty years by using the analysis framework of ChaXuChang(field of difference sequence). Meanwhile, with a method of field survey procedure, the research accumulated a large amount of materials based on the long-term study on Xia village, Ning County in Zhejiang Province. And it completed an integrated ethnography by way of thick description that clarified the relationship between small community and macro-history.In this integrated ethnography, a detailed narrative about Xia villagers is given in aspects such as the inner motivation to social mobility, variation in the relationship between family and family divisions, struggles for the land, space-time feature of being a suburban village, entertainment and discourse in daily lives, changes in sexual relations and the dynamic progress of power pattern in the village. From self, family, village, village-town relation and broader space-time integration, it explains the social changes in the areas south of the Yangtze River in the last thirty years.The author holds the opinion that now the coastal villages have transformed from lateral social integration to the combination pattern of lateral integration with vertical integration. With the construction of daily life as its contents, ChaXu-Chang, based on ChaXu-GeJu and featured by the interaction of action and structure, forms a dialogue with traditional Chinese anthropology.The innovative meaning of the research lies in that it inherited and developed the Chinese anthropology in the areas south of the Yangtze River through a theory and method of integrated ethnography while most researches in traditional Chinese anthropology focused on areas like south China and north China; it formed a contrast with macro-history by constructing micro-history and life history to better understand the emotions and lives of ordinary people as well as the position of small community in the mighty history torrent; it inherited ChaXu-GeJu theory to expose the characteristics of the interaction of individual action and social structure and explored an overall point of view and meaning extension for extended& crossover case in anthropology through the analysis framework of ChaXu-Chang.